


(Non)chalant

by gigantocellularis



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: Canon-typical swearing, F/F, au the pair of them, but also some nice gay feelings, little bit of backstory for Jamie, minor angst?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:42:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29205303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gigantocellularis/pseuds/gigantocellularis
Summary: Jamie could never have predicted that Dani Clayton might be the one to turn her head. First few episodes of canon from Jamie's POV.
Relationships: Dani Clayton & Jamie, Dani Clayton/Jamie
Kudos: 25





	(Non)chalant

Jamie was good at nonchalance. She was adept at affecting an air of complete un-bothered-ness. It was a skill she’d had to pick up growing up the way she did, and it had proved an invaluable armour on the grimy streets (and in the even grimier cells) of London. She’d not had so much practice at it recently, for what was there to bother her at Bly? (Other than the greenfly, she supposed). So if her swagger became ever so slightly doth-protest-too-much around the new au pair, perhaps she couldn’t be blamed. Much to Jamie’s annoyance, Dani Clayton made her feel the very opposite of un-bothered. Dani made Jamie positively chalant.

Not that it looked like things were going to be that way from the off, of course. If you’d asked Jamie to draw you a picture of a girl who absolutely would not turn her head in the year of our lord 1987, she’d have drawn you Dani Clayton. Blonde, all-American, in gold hoop earrings and an aggressively girlish jumper, politely accepting bangers and mash and trying to feign a liking for tea. Wide Bambi eyes popping at Bly’s old-world architecture and affectations. Turn Jamie’s head? It barely twitched.

Jamie had to admit Dani was good with Flora and Miles. Not that Jamie had much affection for the little ankle-biters, mind, but it was nice to see them smiling after what they’d been through. Jamie knew how long it could take to straighten out after a bad childhood. Perhaps a dose of Sunny D was just what these kids needed. Just what Bly needed. Something wholesome and naïve and, well, _American_ , to pull them out of the twisted kitchen-sink nastiness that had snarled them up the past few years.

So when Jamie had discovered Dani in the grip of a choking, full-on panic attack outside the house on what must have been her second week at Bly, she sighed and put down her buckets and they had a chat. Jamie made a joke, raised a smile, chalked it up to Dani being thousands of miles from home in one of the dampest corners of England in sole charge of two little ‘uns. Enough to knock anyone for six. But Jamie resolved to keep an eye on the au pair. It required a little bending of the Golden Rule (people – not worth the effort) perhaps, but after all, to lose one au pair could be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two would look like carelessness. And Jamie (though she’d not admit it) found herself disinclined to be careless around Dani.

It’s not like that was the only thing to worry about around Bly, either. Hannah – usually so fastidious – had reported a crack in the kitchen tile that Jamie couldn’t see, and Miles – usually a bit odd, in the Banks, Von-Trapp way that Jamie was used to from films about posh kids – was acting non-canonically odd. If it wasn’t absurd to label a 10-year-old as such Jamie would have called his manner _insouciant_. ‘Little shit’ was just as accurate, probably, but insouciant seemed apt. _Jamie_ had been a little shit at 10 years old – and fucking proud of it – but this kid was something else.

Which might have explained why she’d lost her rag a bit when she discovered that Miles – so docile under Dani’s supervision earlier that day – had run rampant through her prize roses. Dani had told Jamie off for swearing (in that automatic way that adults in charge of kids for any length of time tended to do, even to other adults), which had made her swear harder. Jamie’s knew her temper was ugly, and there’d been more than a few hard-as-nails birds (and screws) in Holloway who’d have given her a wide berth when she was wound up. But Mary Poppins Clayton stood her ground, looked her in the eye as if Jamie was any snot-nosed kid working themselves up into a tantrum, and deployed a calm statement of reality, light as spider-silk but with a steel core. In the anti-strop barrage, this one was a killer. Chagrined (and – though she wouldn’t have admitted it at the time – more than a little on her way to chalant), Jamie took a deep breath and, in the absence of anything else occurring to her, made a joke. Dani’s relieved bark of laughter seemed to get a little further into Jamie’s chest than it should have done.

***

A mysterious man stalking the grounds? The possibility that Peter motherfucking Quint might be back at Bly? Jamie had skulked in the greenhouse when the copper came round (old habits die hard), but volunteered to go and check out the grounds with Dani, because it meant she got to hold the gun and swagger around being brave. And that Dani got to see her swaggering around being brave. Not that Jamie cared about that (nonchalant). Later they all sat round the fire. Raking over the old muck with Dani in the room felt like chewing tinfoil. Sharp, uncomfortable, useless. Becca hadn’t deserved what she got, and Quint hadn’t got what he deserved, and now bright, beautiful, Bambi Dani had to hear about the whole sorry thing. All Bly’s dirty laundry exposed.

And then there was Owen and whatever he was spiking the hot chocolate with and the absolute wrung-out feeling of the whole myriad day and suddenly Jamie found herself talking about how all the girls in the village were mad for Owen and she got that tinfoil taste in her mouth again as she said it. Like she’d care if Dani was mad for Owen too. Like she was pleased that the vagaries of the evening had brought her and Dani together, on the couch, looking at that Polaroid and talking about love. And possession. And Dani turned to Jamie and said “people do, don’t they?” and Jamie felt like every animal in the forest who met Bambi after he got his antlers and _then_ found out about his mum. Fuck, Jamie thought, she’s been there. Been loved, been possessed, been on the wrong side of someone who’d confused the two. Heck, even Bambi had one hell of a backstory. And in that moment Jamie had that curious experience of seeing someone who’d been in front of her for a while suddenly come into focus. As suddenly and simply as if she’d put on a pair of spectacles. And now that Dani was in focus, Jamie realised she was going to find it hard to look away.

Which, naturally, presented a problem, Jamie thought as she drove home that night. Bly – the village – did seem to exist slightly out of its time. Jamie had got far less hassle for being, well, Jamie, in that teeny Home Counties village than she ever had in London or up North. When she’d mentioned it, sideways, to Owen and Hannah, they’d confirmed it too, talking in low voices in the kitchen. Certain names they’d had thrown at them all their lives just didn’t seem to emanate from Bly’s prim and proper residents. That didn’t mean that Jamie had had any luck in the romance department since she’d arrived. But hell, she knew how to grit her teeth through the searing arc of an unrequited crush – affecting an air of complete un-bothered-ness all the while – and come out the other end intact. 

Although as it turned out, she might not need to after all. She’d armoured up and got ready to get on with things. There were hedges to be trimmed, shrubs to be re-potted, Peter Quints to be creeped out by. She adjusted to the sharp feeling in her chest when the newly in-focus au pair wandered past the greenhouse in search of an errant Wingrave child, and made damn sure it never showed on her face. But then poor Owen’s mum had died, while he was at Bly watching bloody _Storytime_ of all the idiot things to be doing, and everything had just felt so raw and unfair and so bloody fucking sad that Jamie had stood a little closer to Dani than she’d meant to, and kept eye contact a little longer than she should have. And then – miraculously, unexpectedly, absurdly – Dani had returned that eye contact, and her smooth warm had had darted out to catch Jamie’s. The hand of one swimmer to another in a rough seas. And Jamie could see her own wanting mirrored in those wide eyes. Just for a moment. Then the moment passed, as moments do. Dani pulled back, but that touch, that short moment of touch, had confirmed something. Suggested something. Invited something.

Who the hell knew?


End file.
